


displacement

by ten_and_a_rose



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Dimension-Hopping Rose, F/M, Gen, Pete's World Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-08 00:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4283946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ten_and_a_rose/pseuds/ten_and_a_rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose has made it a ritual to face the oncoming storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	displacement

**Author's Note:**

> This has been rattling around in my head, so I thought I'd get it on out into the aether. :)

She’s standing alone and breath-held still on the flat roof of the Torchwood building, her eyes fixed on the horizon.

She’s almost always here by this time of day, as faithfully as she can be – watching and waiting for the oncoming storm.

The storm – the  _storms_ ,  _violent_ storms.  Most of the year they come crashing through in the afternoons and there is brief torrential rain and wind that has been known to uproot trees and there is thunder, deafening thunder but never any lightning, blustering crack and roar but no electric bite.  Another difference, another familiar thing turned strange – another melancholy reminder that this is not where she belongs.

She can see the maelstrom now in the distance, glowering dark clouds, can  _feel_ its rhythm bearing down on her from kilometres away.  It’s one of the few things left that she  _can_   still feel and she’s grateful for it, thinks it might be the closest she will ever be to him again.  It’s become a needful thing, a respite from the numb and arid hollow of her heart.

_Broken_ , she thinks, and she’s almost afraid to find him again, afraid of what he’ll see when he looks at her.  Yet she still dreams about him, and in her dreams she can feel _everything_.  They’re so real that when she wakes she loses him all over again, ripping the never-healed wound open anew and spilling her lifesblood into the night.

She wonders if he ever dreams about her.

The drumbeat is growing stronger, closer, and she can see the curtain of rain advancing and the anticipation is so much it almost curls her toes.  She needs to feel it.  The stars are going out and her hope along with them as every jump lands her in the wrong place or the wrong time or the wrong goddamn universe entirely.  She never knew there could be so much darkness out there.  She never knew she could have so many scars.  She needs the storm to wash it all away.

She keeps a set of dry clothes in the top-floor supply closet and after lunch her gaze will begin to stray out the windows more and more often until it’s time and she has a key to the roof access because her not-quite-father owns the bloody building thank you and it’s become a sacrament what she’s doing – a prayer, a plea and a surrender all at once because she  _needs_.

It’s almost here, and as much as she craves it she can also hear the sharp tattoo of droplets drumming out a wordless refrain, message ringing loudly in all the empty lonely spaces that his presence used to fill up –  _you are alien_ , it says.   _You don’t belong here._

She knows it.  She belongs to a different sky.

She remembers one of his long-ago rambles, working on something when an idea hits him with a cry of  _eureka!_ that makes her grin and revs him up until he’s moving through conceptualities at the impossible speed of Time Lord thought.  He’s hopping madly from idea to idea, then suddenly he’s telling her about meeting an equally rambling and somehow naked Archimedes going on about bathtubs and water.  She remembers how he beamed happily when she asked him to explain the word he’d used next.

_Displacement._  That was the word - would he still be proud?  She knows it better than ever now; she’s living in it.  She is the mote in god’s eye, the foreign body pulled into this universe with no preformed space to take her in.  There was no overflow capacity then and this place wanted her out, pushing back against her, crushing and suffocating.  It still is now, crushing and stealing her breath in the night out of what she imagines is malevolent habit.

The gale hits her full force.

She smiles, lighting up with relief, and she’s solid and unwavering in the storm, arms outstretched and head thrown back against the biting wind as if she’s facing down the legions of Hell with her own body.  The driving downpour pelts hard and cold against her face, hard enough to sting and slap and it feels  _so good_.  Her hair whips around her in all directions like the unstable gusts that move it and the thunder snarls and growls across her skin like the shock wave from some distant dying star.

It infuses her with power.

_Power._

Something inside her wants to howl.

She is not broken after all.

The storm begins to die away as it moves on. She hears the door to the stairwell open as she lowers herself slowly back down into reality, arms dropping to her sides.  She knows it’s a summons; time to go, time to jump.  Still she’s slow to turn and glad it’s Mickey this time and not anyone else because it’s getting tougher and tougher to shutter the muted gold and haunted grey in her used to be amber eyes.

He gives her a bemused half-smile and shakes his head as she walks into the stairwell, out of the dwindling rain.  He knows the ritual also, hands her the two things she needs most.

“Thanks, Mick,” she murmurs softly.

With one hand she takes the towel from him, while the other clutches tightly to her jacket, her armour.  It is well-worn, and in the right light it is TARDIS blue.


End file.
